Ira A. Monarch
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Acquisition Support Program

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Key responsibilities

Mr. Monarch just concluded leading the work on a Capabilities Engineering Framework for the Army Strategic Software Improvement Program. He worked closely with Army Aviation PEO and Aviation Systems Program Management Office, PEO Soldier, PEO C3T, JPEO Chemical Biological Defense and the Armament SEC since 2003. The work focused on (1) reviewing current approaches to requirements analysis and system validation and identifying problems in how they are carried out especially across programs and for Systems of Systems; (2) increasing understanding of how quality attributes (QAs) can be used in specifying requirements and in validation; (3) showing how qualitative methods such as automated content analysis and KJ analysis can be used to evaluate how well QAs are captured in requirements specifications and other information exchanged in the validation process; (4) providing recommendations for resolving the validation problems identified. As a follow-on to this work, Mr. Monarch is collaborating with members of SEI's Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis group and the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a process that combines automated content analysis with other qualitative methods like Kano & KJ analysis and Quality Functional Deployment for use in requirements development involving combat developers, material developers, combatants and contractors. Currently Mr. Monarch is working on content analysis studies for a cost estimation project with the Navy and to provide input for an effort to provide an SEI Roadmap.

Professional Background

Mr. Monarch has pioneered in the evaluation, development and use at the SEI of textual and semantic analysis tools to detect issue patterns in software engineering qualitative data. He also led an SEI research and development investigation that recommended a new strategy for addressing large-scale software projects that continue to fail at alarmingly high rates. Mr. Monarch initiated the Software Risk Repository which, with his help, evolved into a community-wide WWW Software Engineering Information Repository. He continues to investigate the potential of collaborative information technologies for use in improving software engineering processes and building organizational and community memories. Previous to his work at SEI and starting in 1981, Mr. Monarch did research and development in natural language processing and concept based information systems at Carnegie Mellon University. He was one of the principal designers of ONTOS, a knowledge acquisition system used to build semantic representations for machine translation systems. He also helped develop information systems based on selective natural language processing and the semi-automatic construction of thesauri.

Publications (recent or significant)

• "An Innovative Requirements Solution: Marrying Six Sigma KJ Analysis with Automation for Text Analysis and Collaboration," Ira Monarch, Dennis Goldenson and Robert Stoddard, SEPG 2009 North America.
• "Requirements and Their Impact Downstream: Improving Causal Analysis Processes Through Measurement and Analysis of Textual Information," Ira Monarch, Dennis Goldenson and Lawrence T. Osiecki, Technical Report, CMU/SEI-2008-TR-018
• "Software Engineering as Seen Through Its Research Literature: A Study in Co-word Analysis," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, JASIS 49(13): 1206-1223 (1998), with Neal Coulter, and Suresh Konda
• "Mapping Socio-technical Networks in the Making," Social Science, Technical Systems, & Interactive Technology, (Bowker et al.), Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997, with Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Yoram Reich, and Eswaran Subrahmanian
• "Taxonomy-Based Risk Identification," CMU/SEI-93-TR-6, June 1993, with Marvin Carr, Suresh Konda, Carol Ulrich, Clay Walker

Education

• University of California, Philosophy
• University of Pittsburgh, History and Philosophy of Science

Professional Memberships and Activities

• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Senior Member, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)